


A Family In Time

by dream_vs_nightmare



Category: Forever (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-10-22 09:57:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10694655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dream_vs_nightmare/pseuds/dream_vs_nightmare
Summary: “Are you a doctor?” She has eyes that whisper of the ocean and hair that speaks of the sun, and he knows not how to speak, how to breathe.Someone sets off a signal flare in the distance, and the resounding thunder of noise behind him is enough to bring him out of his trance. He moves towards the nurse as she explains that someone found the infant in one of the camps, and that he appears to be in perfect health.Henry takes the boy into his arms and she smiles up at him in the strange blue light of the night. He smiles at her, too, then. It’s been a month and a day since he last did that. And his smile only grows all the wider when he looks to the child in his arms.That’s all it takes to reshape his world: Abigail and Abraham.--Henry, Abigail and Abraham weren't always family, of course; but they became one in time. So here's a(n eventual) series of drabbles about the Morgan family, from the various ways in which they came to be to the various ways in which their story might've ended - but I do warn you, it's a bit of a long one. ;)





	1. To Envy the Dead and Love the Living

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ArgylePirateWD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgylePirateWD/gifts), [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



> So I found this little ficlet on my computer some months ago and thought, "wow, this is cute. I wish I'd done more with this." and then figured that I still could. This was originally met to be a series of vignettes, or a "five times fic" where Henry meets Abigail and Abraham in five very different scenarios, with the first one being how the three truly met and the other four being whatever I could come up with/was prompted with. I think I might still do that here, as well as post a number of other drabbles about my fave Forever fam. As soon as I can write them, of course. ;)
> 
> Or, the drabbles where Henry's life is forever changed the day he meets his family, with little snapshots of their life (and all those could-have-beens) in the years that follow. It's sure to give you all the Morgan family feels, and if it doesn't, please virtually yell at me over the void of the interweb to do better and give you some Morgan family feels, dammit.

 

* * *

Ash swirls overhead as he stills and exhales long into the night. He’s not still for long, though - he never is anymore. For there’s much work to be done, and he supposes there will be for some months to come. But it’s work that needs doing and there's people who need saving. So he does it. He does it, stitching wounds and amputating limbs and soothing the dying. There are so many of them. And he envies them, the dying. The dead. Because he’s never granted that much.

Never.

He moves toward the sound of a baby’s cry as the ash swirls around him and for a moment, he thinks himself dreaming. For he’s not heard a baby, a real, living, breathing baby in days. Weeks. Because they’ve not found any. He tilts his head to the side, wondering - is he dreaming? He doesn't know. But he walks towards the sound anyway, leaving his helmet on the back of the army truck before he steps between a weathered factory’s support beams.

And he stops short, then, breath leaving him in a rush when he sees what’s before him. A nurse stands some feet away, cradling a crying infant in her arms as though they were her own. She soothes them in an instant, and he can do nothing more than stand there, wide-eyed and slack-jawed.

Then she turns towards him, and time seems to freeze and slow as their gazes meet through the ash and the harsh light of the night. The world around him is a strange, ethereal blue tonight - as it always seems to be, when they’re looking for the living. The survivors.

But when she turns towards him, his world is wiped clean of all else. And for the tiniest of moments, she looks much the same; her lips part in wordless awe and her eyes seem to ask if they’ve met before. If she knows him.

Somehow, someway, he thinks she does.

“Are you a doctor?” She has eyes that whisper of the ocean and hair that speaks of the sun, and he knows not how to speak, how to breathe.

Someone sets off a signal flare in the distance, and the resounding thunder of noise behind him is enough to bring him out of his trance. He moves towards the nurse as she explains that someone found the infant in one of the camps, and that he appears to be in perfect health.

Henry takes the boy into his arms and she smiles up at him in the strange blue light of the night. He smiles at her, too, then. It’s been a month and a day since he last did that. And his smile only grows all the wider when he looks to the child in his arms.

That’s all it takes to reshape his world: Abigail and Abraham.

So it is. So it will be.

 

 


	2. Tonight and Forever After

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where the Morgan family meets at a Black Lives Matter Protest and Henry falls in love with Abigail and Abraham faster than Abby can ask if he's a doctor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Or, the one where Karios asked, "As for another scenario with if they all met at some kind of march or protest?" and I obliged them. Hope it suits you, friend!

The air around him echoes with the collective hum of hundreds of voices chanting into the night around them as people, dozens upon dozens of them, march out into the streets. It’s been an age since he’d last done this, out protesting into the night like he had in his youth, but there are few causes that truly stirs his blood like this. And the murder of yet another young, unarmed and innocent black man is something that could not, and would not stand in his book - it never had back in the forties, fifties and sixties, and it sure as hell wouldn’t now.  
  
His eyes begin to sting as the crowd moves down the block en masse, and he’s not sure if it’s from the smoke of a hundred lighters held high in the air or the pepper spray that coats his lungs and lingers in the night around him. And it’s strange, because he can hear an infant crying from somewhere behind him (or are they in front of him?) and he’s startled that he can even register the lone, tiny sound above the dim. But he’d been alive on this earth for far, far long enough to tell the sound of a baby’s cry from most anything else on this earth - and he’s sure that’s the sound that greets him now. That single noise rises to more of a shriek as the protest continues on, a huge mass of people marching, chanting, and even singing as they march down the block.  
  
He’s just linked hands with the couple on either side of him, each bearing a raised sign in their hands, when he hears, rather than sees, a can of tear gas being thrown into the crowd. “Close your eyes, stay close to the ground!” He tries to caution those closest to him, but he’s moments too late. Then all descends into chaos as protestors are near blinded by the sting, eyes red and watering from the gas. And again, he hears an infant wailing, close to a tantrum as the smoke fills the air above the crowd. He follows the sound as best he can, eyes watering once more as he navigates the throng of people about him.  
  
But then, he finds them at last: a mother and child, red-eyed and scared in the harsh red-blue-red-blue glare of the night. Some yards away, a police siren wails a warning call that there’s more to come, and the only thing he can think to ask is if they’ve met before, because he’s sure he knows her from somewhere before this moment. And the woman just shakes her head and asks if he’s a doctor, because she really needs a doctor. He nods his head and confirms that yes, miss, he’s been a doctor for a long, long time.  
  
“I’m a trauma nurse and I just- I wanted to help. It’s in my blood.” She says by way of explanation, shock of it all making her ramble on as he nears closer and gingerly takes her child into his arms. “I knew it’d be rough out here, but dear God, I didn’t think they’d harm poor Abraham.”  
  
“Abraham,” Henry echoes the name before he calls out to those nearest him, “I need a jug of milk, please! Little Abraham’s been blinded by the gas as well. Please, anyone!”  
  
An older man with kind eyes and dark, dark skin hands him a jug of milk and says, “Mostly empty by now, but hope it’ll do” and Henry replies, “Oh, _bless you_!” before he attends to both mother and child.  
  
It’s as he’s pouring the milk over said mother's red, tearing eyes that he learns her name is Abigail. Her hair is like starlight and her eyes, so much like the sea, even in the chaotic, harsh blue light of the arriving SWAT team. But some minutes later, both Abigail and Abraham’s eyes are cleared of tear-gas, and she's quick to embrace him in thank you. "Thank you, thank you, I don't know what I would've done had you not come along. I couldn't see a damned thing to help him, I would've been a mess at it."

"No, no, you don't have to thank me at all, Abigail." He says in what he hopes is a soothing tone, running a hand in circles 'round her back in an effort to calm her. Once she lets him go, he's almost surprised that he misses the contact - and he can't remember the last time someone embraced him. He says as much aloud and then adds in a bit of a deadpan attempt at humor, "Or, well, someone other than my odd, endearing assistant at the morgue, anyway."

That much earns him a smile, and it's a small but brilliant one all the same. It's some minutes more before Abe's cries and wails dwindle and soften into whimpers, and the racing beat of Henry's heart calms some knowing the boy's a bit more at ease. And although it’s been an age since Henry’s held an infant, he rocks the boy to sleep on his shoulder as easily as if he were his own. It’s almost funny, because it feels like Abraham _is_ his own, and what a strange sense of deja-vu to have here, now, at the protested of an innocent, murdered man of all places...  
  
“He’s not yet healed, I’m afraid, but this should do for now.” Henry says to Abigail once little Abraham's fast asleep.  
  
“So it will, Doctor Morgan.” Abigail says in reply.  
  
And she just smiles at Henry when he tries giving her her son back, murmuring something about how Abe’s a rather fussy thing, not one for his mother’s arms these days - or a nap, which he so desperately needs. So they walk on like that for a while together, just Henry, Abigail, and Abe, in a mess of people, pausing to help those who still need it as they walk on. When it comes time to face the SWAT team some hundred yards ahead, they do so together. They'd been but strangers some twenty minutes ago, but now they stand close as a united front, a unit. Though it's just the three of them stood together, Abigail has a fierce expression on her face that says she'd surely take the SWAT team on. And when she reaches for his hand in the harsh blue light of the night, he’s not one to turn her away.  
  
Henry couldn’t turn her away, not even if he tried. For he thinks, these two became his family the second he saw them tonight. Or perhaps, they chose him and him alone all along, perhaps they knew he would come find them, help them. But either way, he’s theirs - Abigail’s and Abraham’s - tonight and forever after, so long as they’ll have him. And he soon finds that they will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do have another idea for a protest-centered drabble where Abe's an adult, or a teenager at the very least. I think that dynamic would be just as fun to explore as these baby!Abe drabbles have been. Can you imagine the stories Abigail and Henry would get to tell him when he was older?
> 
> Send me a comment with what ya'll would like to see next here or on my tumblr (link in bio)! Perhaps Henry or Abby's a celebrity trying to hide from the papparazzi (Notting Hill, anyone?) Hell, I'd even take your favorite Disney movie AU! Hit me with your best shot, babes. ;) The Morgan family feels drabbles have only just begun!

**Author's Note:**

> Hi yes hullo, please periodically spam the comments & my tumblr inbox (shipping-always-comes-withaprice) to keep updating this fic with more drabbles as time goes on, because life is messy and I'll probably forget otherwise. Also, please let me know if there's a "fives times" meeting you'd like to see, as I'd very much love to write them!


End file.
